Malini Ranganathan is Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University and a political ecologist and geographer by training. Most broadly, she is a scholar of urban environmental justice interested in the political economy of land, labor, and ecology in the capitalist city. She researches environmental casteism and environmental racism in urban contexts, what she refers to as "environmental unfreedoms." Specifically, she studies how caste and racial histories shape segregated housing and property relations, water and sanitation access, and flood and climate vulnerability. She works on both India and the U.S. She is currently working on a book, The Urbanization of Caste Power: Land, Labor, and Environmental Justice Politics in Bengaluru. The book re-examines Bengaluru through the analytic of caste power, tracing the historical and contemporary production of housing, labor, and flooding and other ecological inequities. It considers how slum, legal, and union activism disrupts injustices perpetuated by caste and class power. She is co-author of Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell Press, 2023). The monograph weaves together ethnographic and literary analysis to argue that corruption politics lie at the heart of, rather than being a deviation from, (neo)liberal capitalism and its 21st century authoritarian guises. Not merely a synonym for bribery or illegality, "corruption talk" is deployed by various caste, racial, and class formations to make sense of elite abuses of power and deepening ecological, economic, and spatial inequality in cities. Finally, Dr. Ranganathan investigates environmental racism and climate justice in American cities. Her work on abolitionist climate justice in Washington, DC was featured on NPR. Most recently, she is part of a team that was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for RECIPES, a project that promotes equitable and sustainable urban and regional food systems. For an overview of her transnational approach to research and teaching, stream this podcast. In 2023, Dr Ranganathan was recognized with the Harold M. Rose Award for Antiracism Research and Practice from the American Association of Geographers. In 2020 and 2021 she won the SIS and university-wide awards respectively for Outstanding Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In 2022 she won the AU Morton-Bender Prize for achievements at the associate professor level. She won an American Council of Learned Societies-Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant in 2017-2019. Please visit her website to learn more about her research.

Her research is published in EP:D (Society and Space), Environmental Justice, Ethnic and Racial Studies, The Lancet - Global Health, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Environment and Planning: A (Economy and Society), Capitalism Nature Socialism, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Geography, and Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, among other journals. Her scholarship also appears in public venues such as e-Flux Architecture, Society and Space, and Black Perspectives. She serves on the editorial boards of Antipode, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Environment and Planning: D (Society and Space). Previously, Dr Ranganathan was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and has had research positions at TERI in New Delhi, ENDA-Tiers Monde in Dakar, and the Asian Development Bank in Manila. At SIS, Dr Ranganathan teaches SISU 250 (Environmental Sustainability and Global Health), SISU 349 (Global Cities, Justice, and the Environment), and SIS 620 (Environmental Justice).